* 
IV 
VILLAS NEAR ROME 
I 
CAPRAROLA AND LANTE 
rflHE great cardinals did not all build their villas 
within sight of St. Peter’s. One of them, 
•JL Alexander Farnese, chose a site above the 
mountain village of Caprarola, which looks forth over 
the Etrurian plain strewn with its ancient cities — Nepi, 
Orte and Civita Castellana — to Soracte, rising solitary 
in the middle distance, and the encircling line of snow- 
touched Apennines. 
There is nothing in all Italy like Caprarola. Burck- 
hardt calls it “perhaps the highest example of restrained 
majesty which secular architecture has achieved”; and 
Herr Gurlitt makes the interesting suggestion that 
Vignola, in building it, broke away from the traditional 
palace-architecture of Italy and sought his inspiration in 
France. “Caprarola,” he says, “shows the northern 
castle in the most modern form it had then attained. . . . 
ii 
127 
